


What the Well-Dressed Man is Wearing

by malacophilous (orphan_account)



Category: Jeeves & Wooster, Jeeves - P. G. Wodehouse
Genre: Cucumbers, Gardens & Gardening, Hijinks & Shenanigans, Innuendo, M/M, Smoking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-02
Updated: 2012-07-02
Packaged: 2017-11-09 01:14:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/449621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/malacophilous
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'I planted them, you see, and promptly forgot about them—thinking, and rightly so, as this was my first foray into green-thumbery, I ought to stand back and let nature take its course, but unfortunately for me Nature decided to haul up its slacks a bit and take its course quite assiduously.'</p>
<p>Bertie does a lot of things accidentally, and ends up accidentally scoring off Jeeves, properly, for the first time ever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What the Well-Dressed Man is Wearing

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was a Christmas present (and also a thank-you gift) for my old friend Lou, and contains some of her favourite things: gardening, knitting and monkeys.

At times, it must be said, I have noticed a certain  _thingness_  in my man’s behaviour. Sterling fellow, of course—one might even say the best of a wide range of sterling fellows—ready at all times to come to the aid of the party and something-or-other the ravelled sleeve of care, but there have been moments when, contrary and I daresay even offensive to natural practice, Jeeves feels the need to elbow in at precisely when I‘d much rather he didn‘t. There I will be, going about my business as any dashing man-about-town does, perhaps with a merry tra-la on my lips and something of an idea that God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world, and suddenly Jeeves swoops down upon me like a wolf in the fold and makes me feel like rather a dumb brick.  
  
‘Sir,’ he said, his arms folded behind his back. He was looking very stern, and all that disrupted the image of an ancient god whose morning tea has come a bit late was the fact that he was wearing Wellington boots. ‘Perhaps you have planted them a bit thick on the ground?’  
  
‘Nonsense, Jeeves,’ I said, brandishing my trowel with the carefree air of a johnnie who doesn‘t know what‘s coming. ‘I adore cucumbers, so of course I want a lot of them. Besides, I’ve done just what it says on the packet  _in re_  planting them.’  
  
‘I’m afraid you are mistaken, sir.’  
  
‘No, look,’ I said, showing him the little paper envelope from whence the seeds had come, ‘it says right here to plant them at least one centimetre apart, as I have done. I believe you’ll find that no mistake has been made.’  
  
‘Metre, sir.’  
  
‘Eh? What?’  
  
‘One metre, sir, not centimetre.’  
  
‘Surely not!’ I said, looking down at the tilled soil with an expression that subtly blended incredulity and the sort of lurching horror one feels when the heroine of a Hollywood film decides to go through the door behind which lurks a gelatinous monster. ‘Are you certain, Jeeves?’  
  
‘ _Cover well with earth,_ ’ he read out from the seed packet, ‘ _at least one metre separating each seed._  The instructions are quite clear, sir.’  
  
I rocked back on my knees, sighing, looking round my new allotment and feeling that really, thinking I had it in me to tend to a garden properly, like some sort of monk or country squire, was a sign of my heretofore unplumbed depths of goofiness.  
  
‘Well, Jeeves,’ I said, getting to my feet and brushing off the knees of my denim trousers (the likes of which Jeeves had barely permitted, and had only passed inspection on the grounds that if I wore regular trousers they would be ruined), ‘I’ll never find them now, seeing as I‘ve covered them well with earth, as instructed. It would take hours to roust them all. I figure we’ll just have to wait until the green bits start coming up, and hope for the best.’  
  
Jeeves’ eyebrow twitched. ‘As you say, sir.’

* * *

  
I had come into the little square of land when Bingo’s uncle, Lord Bittlesham—the one I used to read romantic novels to while pretending to be their author—decided that his lumbago was too pervasive for him to dream of keeping up with it. He had never struck me as an earthy fellow, this uncle, and as it turns out he’d never so much as planted a bean. Lord Bittlesham had foisted it off, therefore, on Bingo, and, as one does, Bingo foisted it off on his nearest unsuspecting friend-from-childhood.  
  
Bingo thought I was mad, of course, when I accepted the land as a gift. Upon driving out and clapping lights on it for the first time, I understood his amusement: the acre was the most depressingly weed-choked piece of ground I’ve ever seen. Jeeves was sporting enough to pitch in and assist me in clearing it up, however, and soon it was devoid enough of wind-blown chips wrappers, tattered bits of newspaper and fag-ends to start actually growing things on it. I decided, since I have always liked tea foods, to plant cucumbers.  
  
As it turns out, cucumber seeds ought to have warning labels like one finds on the better sort of mass-manufactured firecrackers one sees round the market near Guy Fawkes Day.  _Keep away from children and animals, stand well clear after lighting fuse,_  and all that, and dashed if I ever expected it but cucumbers are similarly explosive.  
  
I planted them, you see, and promptly forgot about them—thinking, and rightly so, as this was my first foray into green-thumbery, I ought to stand back and let nature take its course, but unfortunately for me Nature decided to haul up its slacks a bit and take its course quite assiduously. Two months later, while enjoying a lively afternoon at the Drones, something Freddie Widgeon said brought the memory of my erstwhile vegetable patch rushing back.  
  
‘So I said to him, Sparky old chum, if you‘re so worried about your inheritance being nicked then why not put the dashed money into a couple banks or some rot like that?’  
  
My mind leapt made the following rapid-fire string of connections:  _banks, Rosie M. Banks, Bingo, wonder what he’s been up to lately?, that reminds me I saw his uncle at Ascot, his suit was rather billowy round his billowy portions this year, like a sort of grey sack, but either way he was quite kind, by way of Bingo, to give me that spot of vegetable patch._  
  
‘Good lord!’ I said, executing an admirable sitting high-jump. ‘I’ve forgotten my cucumbers!’  
  
‘I’ll give you a cucumber, Bertie,’ said Catsmeat, the lecherous old blot, ‘euphemistically, I mean to say.’  
  
‘Bit of an early hour for euphemisms, isn’t it?’ noted Freddie. ‘It’s not even tea yet. Isn’t there a rule about not being suggestive before tea?’  
  
‘Who’d make a damned silly rule like that?’ Pongo Twistleton interjected, appalled at the very idea.  
  
‘Rules are meant to be broken,’ said Catsmeat with a wink. ‘Like the one that says I’m not allowed to have a sporting go at your cousins when you‘re not looking, Bertie—’  
  
‘And the one about not bicycling along Downing Street while sloshed,’ Freddie added, completely glossing over Catsmeat‘s scandalous statement. ‘Isn’t that a law?’  
  
‘You’re not serious?’ said Pongo, aghast. ‘First I’ve heard of it! There goes my evening plans.’  
  
I took a moment out of this feast of reason to explain my exclamash.  
  
‘Do you mean to tell us,’ said Freddie slowly, ’that you planted a load of cucumbers right on top of each other?’  
  
‘Er, yes,’ I said, ‘that’s the nub of it.’  
  
Freddie turned to our two companions and raised his brows so high they threatened to disarrange his hair parting. ‘We’ve  _got_  to see this, lads.’

* * *

  
‘Egad, Bertie, what do you plan to  _do_  with them all?’  
  
It appeared that several thousand cucumbers and their extended families now occupied my acre of garden. I was suddenly thankful that it was outside of the metrop limits, as otherwise the beastly things no doubt would have been flouting some well-intentioned anti-crowding ordinance. The bulk of the menace seemed to originate from the back edge of the plot, where I had popped the seeds into the ground two months prior; the cucumbers rose up in a great twisted mass of vines, in the thick of which was quite literally a pile of them the size of a small haystack or perhaps an overturned rowboat. It appeared as though strange and previously undiscovered nutrient properties had leached into the soil from the old bits of paper and snuff tins that had littered the place before Jeeves and I attacked it with spades, because some of the cucumbers were as long and thick as my forearm. They were of unearthly proportions, all knobby and waxy-skinned, sticking up at odd angles; one near the far end had a large crow perched on it as if the thing were Merlin‘s staff.   
  
The sheer number of vegetables per square foot was enough to stagger the poet Shelley, who, according to Madeline Bassett, consistently shied away from the roasts and boileds in favour of their leafy counterparts because he purportedly felt it kept his soul pure. I hadn’t seen so much green since Uncle Tom took up the rug in his smoking room to find that some description of verdant lichen had begun to carve away at the floor.  
  
I hid my e.’s behind my h.’s and let out a hollow g.  
  
‘You could sell them to the public,’ Pongo suggested. ‘I’ve got a wheelbarrow, if you’d like, and a cloth cap.’  
  
‘Why’ve you got a wheelbarrow?’ Freddie asked.  
  
‘It’s great fun.’  
  
‘Undoubtedly, but of dubious usefulness.’  
  
Pongo huffed irritably. ‘Well, if I ever had about a million cucumbers, I’d be quite grateful for a friend with a wheelbarrow.’  
  
Freddie saw the flaw in this. ‘Yes, but what’s the point of a wheelbarrow if he could just chuck them in the boot?’  
  
‘I figure he’s got to transport them to the car first.’  
  
‘The car’s right here, though,’ said Freddie, and there was a ring of truth to his words.  
  
‘True,’ Catsmeat agreed. ‘It’s practically frotting up against Mother Nature.’  
  
‘I reckon he could put the matter to Jeeves,’ Pongo suggested, letting the wheelbarrow rest for a moment. ‘I mean to say, the man’s a genius. I’ve no idea how so much brain fits into a number eight hat.’  
  
‘Nor I,’ Freddie agreed. ‘One would think he’d take at least an eleven.’  
  
‘No,’ I said firmly. Not having spoken for some minutes, my utterance caused my fellow Drones to jump a little; they may have forgotten, as one sometimes does in the fierce rush of intellectual interchange, that I was still present—even Catsmeat, who was leaning casually on what was very obviously my two-seater. (Catsmeat, it must be said, is a fellow who does a lot of leaning over other fellows’ cars.)  
  
‘No?’ Freddie said, doing his impression of an incredulous echo. ‘But Jeeves can solve anything! Surely a trifling thing like a squadron of cucumbers wouldn’t stump him?’  
  
‘I refuse to ask for his help with this,’ I said, and explained in great and emotional detail the metres-centimetres fiasco, and how I needed only to mention the results for my valet’s mouth to twitch in that certain way that clearly communicates, to those well-versed in the man’s cryptic expressions, that he’s laughing his blasted head off on the inside.  
  
My friends nodded sagely and Freddie gave me a gentle pat on the shoulder.  
  
‘Say no more, Bertie old chum, say no more. There are some things that a man’s natural pride cannot stick at any price.’  
  
Pongo lit a comforting cigarette and placed it between my fingers to spare me the trouble of taking it, myself. ‘We understand and sympathise with the overwhelming cucumber-shaped pain you carry in your heart.’  
  
‘You need look no further than us,’ Catsmeat announced, ‘for the help and support you need in this troubling time.’  
  
Pongo nodded solemnly, but ruined it slightly by talking round his cigarette, causing it to wobble amusingly. ‘We will strain every nerve to produce a resolution.’  
  
Freddie snickered a little, but at my pained look he twigged it. Apparently he had found the use of the word ‘produce’ to be amusing, the blighter.  
  
I heaved a weighty sigh. ‘But what can be done? Unless we burn the acre to the ground, they’ll eat all of London and the home counties by Sunday next.’  
  
‘We could have Boko write us a script and turn your vegetable patch into a monster film,’ Freddie noted. ‘Could be quite a lucrative venture.’  
  
I found myself buoyed up by the thought of Boko. I mean to say, the man looked like a parrot with a secret sorrow and wore flannel bags on even the most austere occasions, and yet he was considered pretty hot stuff by the nibs in his field. I thought to myself, if a hopeless goof like Boko can succeed, why can’t I? After all, I had shown in the past a great affinity for rising up on the stepping stones of my dead self to a pretty comfortable posish.  
  
‘No, chaps,’ I said, ‘though that is an excellent idea, I not only want to rid myself of superfluous cucumbers; I want to prove to Jeeves that I’ve won.’  
  
There was a blank in the dialogue. Catsmeat examined his fingernails at arms’ length. Pongo reached the end of his cigarette and lit another.  
  
‘But,’ said Freddie carefully, making the face he always made when being tactful, which made him resemble a puppy that has just been asked to explain how to change a tyre, ‘you haven’t won, Bertie. Jeeves was right about the metres.’ He paused then added delicately, ‘And about being a bit thick.’  
  
I huffed crossly. ‘Good to finally hear your honest opinion of my mental faculties.’  
  
‘I meant you planted them a bit thick.’  
  
‘Your misstep, I feel,’ said Catsmeat to Freddie, ‘is in the lack of proper adverb use.’  
  
‘Thickly, then. Dash it, you know what I mean.’  
  
Pongo had fallen unusually silent. I waved my cigarette at him. ‘Still with us, Pongo?’  
  
His eyes were curiously bright. ‘I’ve got a plan.’

* * *

  


My pals at the Drones have many unusual and one might say God-given talents. Bingo, for instance, does a harrowingly accurate impression of Beatrice Lillie, my cousin Eustace can fit eighty toffees in his mouth at one go, Catsmeat has set the record for hitting the game pie at lunchtime spot-on from the far window with twenty-seven consecutive rolls, and not to blow my own horn or anything of the sort, but my imitation of a chicken laying an egg has been said to be the most stirring in modern memory. I was not surprised, therefore, when I learned that Pongo can knit like the wind.

‘I spent a whole summer chaperoning my maiden aunt in Bath,’ he explained in a sort of pained, reminiscent way as we sat in the smoking room later that afternoon. He had several tangled messes of wool gathered round him like kittens and a couple of long and dangerous-looking dowel-like implements that may or may not have been designed off of plans from the Spanish Inquisition. ‘Taking the waters for her health, don’t you know. All she did was knit and talk about how I ought to marry some girl or other and get to breeding heirs. As I couldn’t agree with her on the latter subject, I created a diversion by asking her to teach me some patterns and whatnot.’

I nodded sagely with the wisdom of personal exp.; in conversations with me my aunt Agatha, who puts the spilt blood of innocents in her tea rather than cream, has often employed such phrases as ‘breeding’ and ‘churning out the next generation of Englishmen’. She, of course, belongs to several women’s clubs and often forgets that she isn’t in the smoking room, where I’m sure such loose talk is acceptable and even encouraged.

‘I was unaware that maiden aunts needed chaperoning,’ Freddie observed, watching Pongo work with the sort of perturbed fascination one sees on the faces of carnival-goers as they drink in the sight of The World’s Most Flexible Man. ‘I mean to say, not going to haul off and snog some unsuspecting johnnie, are they? Maiden aunts are, after all, maiden for a reason, I would think.’

‘I had an aunt once,’ said Catsmeat conversationally, ‘who never married because she had the clap.’

‘Might have met that aunt,’ said a gingery voice from behind my chair. I twisted round, and up out of a trap popped my cousin Claude like the demon king in a Christmas panto. ‘Long, lovely curls?’

‘She wore a bad wig,’ said Catsmeat.

‘Must have been someone else’s aunt, then,’ Claude said amiably, looking at the thing speared on the end of Pongo’s yarn-tongs or whatever they are. It looked like a shapeless pocket with a long, thin strap trailing from the open end. ‘I say, Pongo, joy of my youth, what’s that you’re tangling up there, is it a prophylactic sock?’

‘It’s a portable cucumber cosy,’ Freddie chimed in. ‘Newest thing in fashion, don’t you know.’

‘But I haven’t got a cucumber,’ Claude noted, as one does in these situations.

‘Oh, I  _do_  beg to differ,’ Catsmeat rebutted in his lecherous way, giving my cousin the eye.

‘Well,’ I said, in an attempt to keep the censors from swooping down on us from the wings and clapping us all in irons, ‘you will have, once you buy some off me.’

Claude considered this for a moment before he replied. ‘But what use have I for a cucumber in a cucumber cosy?’

‘Girls go mad for them,’ Catsmeat explained. Claude scoffed at this.

‘And  _you’re_  the authority on girls now, I imagine?’

‘On rare occasions,’ Catsmeat said in a mock-hurt voice. ‘Besides, I know quite a lot of chorus girls.’

‘They’re not the same as regular girls, old carrot! They dance in a line and wear nude-coloured pants.’

Catsmeat rolled his eyes good-naturedly. ‘I daresay that doesn’t make them  _irregular._ ’

‘Ha! Show me a normal girl who wears nude-coloured pants in her daily life and I’ll show you a fiver.’

‘We have an accord!’

‘So,’ said Pongo, marshalling the conversation and dragging it back to the point, ‘how about it? A fancy cucumber for every day of the month, and this attractive cosy, all for the quite reasonable price of a single pound! Quite a steal, what?’

Claude hummed, rubbing his chin and elevating a single brow like a contemplative film villain. ‘Oh, all right then, push it across.’

‘Excellent,’ said Freddie, grabbing one of the completed cucumber cosies and tossing it to Claude, who unbelted the requested pound obligingly. ‘We’ve got your vegetables in the boot of Bertie’s car, he’ll drive it round and chuck them at you at your convenience.’

‘Right ho,’ Claude trilled amusedly.

‘And tell all your friends: the cutting-edge fashion-vegetable firm of Twistleton, Potter-Pirbright, Wooster and Widgeon is now open for business!’

* * *

  


I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but it seems to be a pretty dashed common occurrence as one toddles through life that the best-laid schemes of mice and men gang aft something-or-other. I think the word I’m looking for is agley, but that can’t be right, can it?

I mean to say, over the following week the fancifully ghastly things became a fashion sensation among London’s better element, namely my fellow Drones and the chaps of a couple of our brother-clubs round the metrop. Once Pongo got some other colours of yarn he started styling them for different occasions: the Morning Suit edition, the Country House Gathering edition, Golfing, Dancing and Opera editions, even a dove-grey version for wedding breakfasts. We raked in loads of cash, practically in bundles, and by all accounts the sitch seemed to be coming up roses.

A few days into what modern chroniclers have begun calling Cucumber Fever, Claude and Eustace started a trend of strapping the cosies, complete with cucumbers, round themselves under their waistcoats so the yarn-sheathed vegetables dropped down round their trouser-flies to create a sort of mobile-codpiece effect. It was terribly suggestive and almost outright obscene, the way the cucumbers hung there and jolly well swung in the breeze and with the slightest movement. I’m surprised that Scotland Yard didn’t start hauling in fellows for indecency. They couldn’t really, of course, because by following a harmless trend no one was saying or doing anything in flagrant disregard of the law. After all, they were only cucumbers, but I distinctly remember seeing a few constables—you know, the sort who hang about on corners looking vigilant and surly in turns—fondle their nightsticks (or are they cudgels?) as if they longed for nothing more than to clock one of the cuke-wearers in the todger.

When cheap knock-offs began appearing in wares stalls in the Circuses and arcades, my chums and I took that to mean that we had made it to the big time. The upshot, of course, of the aforesaid trend was the ganging aft of whatever-it-is to which I alluded above. Although Pongo’s knobby woollen cucumber-cosies, paired with Freddie’s and Catsmeat’s ringing sales pitches, got the first crop of mutant vegetables off my hands, dash it, I couldn’t gloat to Jeeves—which was part of the point! —because there was still some little coolness between us about a pair of really quite excellent silver monkey-shaped cufflinks of which he disapproved. I got them off a swarthy man with a wheelbarrow full of trinkets from India who occasionally trundled round outside the Drones before lunch. I found my new cufflinks to be quite fetching, especially the little amethysts for eyes, and considered them a clever and cutting-edge edition to my wardrobe as well as a potentially fascinating conversation piece. Jeeves, I feel I need not even mention, had other ideas, and thus we were no longer precisely two minds with but a single thought. He had taken the entirely unwarranted viewpoint that they were only fit to be melted down and made into worthier items, if only, and here I am quoting him directly, they ‘weren’t but plated nickel.’ Plated nickel, I mean to  _say!_

Despite my reticence to discuss the matter, the subject of my vegetables came up one evening as I decanted myself into an armchair after a raucous dinner round the club. I was in a vibrant mood, all  _joie de vivre_  and pleasing smiles. The Drones’ reaction to my cufflinks had been one long and admiring scream from start to finish, and on the whole I was feeling pretty bobbish.

‘If I might inquire, sir,’ Jeeves began as he scared me up a whisky-and-soda.

‘Of course, of course! Say on, Jeeves, my fine fellow. I long to put your mind at ease  _in re_  any variety of subjects you may choose to probe.’

‘I only wondered, sir, how your vegetable garden has been getting on? I have refrained from introducing the matter into conversation, as I felt it was somewhat of a matter of personal pride. I did not wish to overstep my bounds, sir, nor cause you discomfort.’

He said it in what I think is called an impartial way, and it was difficult to read his expression. But that’s Jeeves all over. Cloaks his emotions, I mean to say.

‘Oh, ah?’ I said, with something of a smirk strolling across my lips. ‘Is that so, Jeeves? Well, I am here to tell you that my vegetable garden is not only getting on splendidly, but has also become a rather lucrative enterprise.’

I wondered silently to myself—as one does, I mean to say, one can scarcely wonder silently to others—whether it was really the brightest idea to tell Jeeves about my clever plan, and how the cucumber cosies, which I’m sure he’d noticed swinging from the waistbands of every other fashionable chappie round the metrop, had come into being. To do that would mean admitting my mistake in planting so many of the bally things, and his thorny comment about my monkey cufflinks still rankled hotly in my bosom so I felt ill-prepared to give in and confess that he had been right about the centimetres.

Instead, therefore, I let the matter rest. At this juncture the fellow might have thrown in an inquisitive, ‘Indeed, sir?’, but I pointedly opened the novel I was reading—a juicy one where this fellow gets murdered and a couple of chaps have to figure out why—and pretended not to hear.

* * *

  
I had been having quite a pleasant dream in which I was a sailor in some Victorian musical comedy when a sound like the Last Trump fell upon my shell-likes and made me leap on my pillow like a gaffed salmon.  
  
A telegram, Jeeves informed me as he entered the room and found I was awake, had just arrived for me, and he said he regretted to say that the boy who delivered it had leaned rather high-spiritedly on the bell. I was about to make a scathing remark about the moral code of the modern telegram boy, but the bitter syllables barely passed my lips when my eyes fell upon the telegram and I confess I started.  
  
And I’ll tell you why I started: I was surprised. The name of the sender of the telegram was Colette Saint-Jean, and it was a name I knew well. I’d met the girl during that summer at Cannes with Aunt Dahlia and my cousin Angela—the same summer I met Madeline Bassett, that well-known gnome-believer and confirmed Oh-Look-er.  
  
Thankfully Colette, though Parisian, was one of those perfectly rational lipsticky girls with a bobbed hairstyle and bucket-shaped hats that mostly eclipsed her head—a girl, in short, with whom one could take spins in the old two-seater, drink whisky-and-sodas and talk about the races. I have some idea that she was involved in a magazine or something of the kind. I had thoroughly enjoyed her company, but after leaving Cannes I hadn’t thought further about it, nor had she made any effort to contact me. Just a holiday acquaintance, don’t you know, and though I would have liked to know how she was jogging along and all that, really, it was no reason to interrupt a dream in which I sang about pirate kings before my adoring public.  
  
 _Bertie,_  the telegram read,  _in London for the magazine. You are going to take me to lunch today. Love from Colette._  
  
‘Well, Jeeves,’ I said, swinging my legs over the edge of the bed and plunging my toes into the carpet, ‘put out a festive and vaguely Continental tie, I’m taking a girl to lunch today.’  
  
‘Very good, sir.’

* * *

  


Colette’s appearance had changed very little in the gap in our friendship, save that she had taken to wearing an enormous rope of pearls that threatened, over the course of lunch, to make its way into her plate of oysters as they, the pearls, were no doubt feeling a stab of homesickness.

‘Bertie,’ she said, placing a cigarette in her flashy and rather long red holder and extending it across the table for me to light, ‘I must confess it is my career which drove me to see you.’

‘Oh, ah?’ I said, not having the foggiest i. what she meant, and it might have showed.

‘I have been promoted at the magazine,’ she announced lazily, as if it had only been a matter of time, ‘to the position of Lead Trend Spotter.’

‘Congratulations!’ I said, for it seemed in order. I mean to say, I hadn’t realised Lead Trend Spotter was a thing someone could be.

‘I received word from a friend of mine who lives here in London,’ she went on, smoking in a way I always forget French women actually do, and not just in films, ‘that something called a cucumber cosy has become terribly popular here, and I want to cash in on it.’

Well, I mean, really! I’d no idea the word had reached as far as Paris.

‘I tapped my contacts,’ she said, and before that moment I had thought that was only a thing that spies in paperback novels did, ‘and popular theory has it that you invented the trend.’

‘Er,’ I said, giving full credit to Pongo as soon as I’d got my tongue untangled. She waved the idea away.

‘One cannot put a name like Pongo Twistleton in a magazine article,’ she said. ‘And besides, I do not know if he is ugly, and I would like to include a photograph. You aren’t ugly.’

She said all this in an appallingly frank and casual manner which, if displayed by an English girl, would have been reason to put her into a sack or whatever they do to Odalisques, to save the country from corruption from within, but when Colette said it she made it almost endearing.

‘I shall have to get Pongo’s permission,’ I noted.

‘Of course, of course, of course,’ she said with a roll of her eyes, blowing a thin plume of smoke into the air above her head, ‘but in France, you shall be the public face of the cucumber cosy.’

Well, what can one say to that but ‘Right ho’?

* * *

  
When the article ran, a month later and in the mounting popularity of Cucumber Fever, Colette kindly sent me a copy. There was some guff about it being 'shocking that such a cutting-edge trend could have come out of England, our backsliding and degenerate neighbours', and I may have been described as a sartorial genius (a statement which Jeeves would have vehemently protested and possibly even seen as libellous). The photo was a good one: I didn’t have anything in my teeth, my hair was just how I like it and my dimple wasn’t even showing. Overall, I was pleased with the results.  
  
That is, until Jeeves saw it. Silly of me, leaving it out on the coffee table like that, practically turned to the place and marked with an X, but I was so dashed proud of it I couldn’t hide the bally thing under a bushel.  
  
‘Sir?’ he said stiffly, as if he were made of wood and the act of speech pained him, eying my cufflinks with a look of protracted despair, ‘might I ask—’  
  
‘Yes, Jeeves,’ I said, deciding, for it couldn’t be helped now, that the moment was nigh to roll up my sleeves and get down to some serious gloating. ‘I am, in the eyes of the most well-circulated fashion quarterly in Paris, a sartorial genius. You need not be alarmed. The fanmail will, no doubt, be pouring in shortly—might want to put a basket under the mail slot.’  
  
‘Yes, sir.’  
  
‘And Jeeves?’  
  
‘Sir?’  
  
‘If it’s not too much trouble, might you throw together a cucumber sandwich for me? I find that international fame has made me a bit peckish.’  
  
His eyebrows flickered towards the middle of his face for an instant, like a pair of flints being struck together. ‘Of course, sir.’  
  
‘Oh, one last thing, Jeeves,’ I said, holding up a finger as he turned toward the kitchen. He stopped, and looked back, his face inscrutable as a mask.  
  
‘Yes, sir?’  
  
‘These cufflinks are spiffing. So spiffing, in fact, that I have purchased you a pair for your very own.’  
  
His eyes took on a dreamy, distant look, a look I’m sure Brutus had right before he gave Julius Caesar a juicy one between the third and fourth ribs. ‘You are too kind, sir.’  
  
As I was feeling magnanimous, I said, ‘You may do whatever you like with them.’  
  
The corner of his mouth twitched, and he narrowed his eyes at me. ‘I shall jump on them, sir,’ he said with a flash of teeth, ‘and once I have jumped on them, I shall burn them, and once their charred and twisted remains have cooled from the flames I shall jump on them again.’  
  
‘Right ho, Jeeves,’ I said with a merry tra-la, ‘carry on.’


End file.
